First, a little info about me. My name is Dave. I’m 53 years old and have had anxiety and depression on and off since I was about 13. Most of my problems centered around social events and dating. I would get so nervous that I would get a lump in my throat, upset stomach and nausea just thinking about it. It was terrifying because I didn’t understand what was happening.

I’m going to share what I have learned over the years as if I could go back in time and help my younger self. Hopefully, I can help you too.

For smart and creative people like us, our own brains can be our worst enemies. Certain situations can trigger our “Fight or Flight” responses at the wrong times. This is useful when our lives are actually in danger, but not much help when giving a presentation or on a date.

My goal is not to eliminate anxiety all together, but to manage it. What I mean by that, is to start some relaxation techniques while you are at a level 3 instead of getting yourself all worked up to a level a 7-10.

Our minds are able to turn a simple thing into a gut wrenching, stomach churning anxiety attack. Our internal dialogue can convince us that we are the biggest loser the world has ever seen. Negative thoughts or “self talk” is a sure fire way to make yourself miserable. Ask yourself this: If a good friend came to you with a problem, would you talk to them in same way that you talk to yourself? No, probably not. Thoughts can bring about feelings. Feelings can bring about body symptoms. Symptoms like nausea, lump in the throat, numbness in the hands, rapid breathing, etc..

This was by far the most frightening and confusing aspect of anxiety for me because the body symptoms reinforced the negative thoughts and feelings I was having. “This must be real! Why else would I feel this way!” It’s your brain’s way of trying to protect you from danger. Sometimes it gets it wrong.

Start to question your thoughts and feelings. “Am I really in danger?” “Am I really going crazy?” No, I’m not. I’m just feeling some anxiety and it will pass. Nobody has ever died from anxiety, even though it’s hard to convince yourself of that when you are in the middle of it. If you can think your way into anxiety, you can think your way out of it too. It takes practice. Your brain learned this method to protect you, but you can tweak it in a way so that it works for you instead of against you.

Every single anxiety event that I’ve ever had always includes rapid breathing, neck tension, and stomach/appetite problems. Rapid breathing leads to hyperventilation. Hyperventilation leads to poor oxygen to the brain and muddled, confusing, negative thinking. It would come on suddenly and was so terrifying that all I wanted to do was run away and hide.

I’ve learned to spot these symptoms quicker. At a level 3 instead of level 9. When you are at level 9, the negative thoughts are coming at you so fast that you can’t process them. Let’s not get to level 9 anymore, OK?

Question the feelings and thoughts.

Slow down your breathing. Google “Deep Breathing Techniques”. It’s a form of Yoga or meditation. Do this for at least 2 min several times a day. If you practice, you can do this without anyone knowing what you’re doing.

Relax your shoulders. Do some stretches. Roll your head around slowly.

Distract yourself. Do something you enjoy, clean the kitchen. Anything to get your mind off of what you’re thinking about.

Celebrate small victories. Go out with friends, challenge yourself.

You have more control than you think you do. It takes practice.

The more you avoid stressful trigger situations, the harder it is to face them when you have to.

It’s a great feeling knowing that you can keep your anxiety at level 3 or below. Nobody wants to go through life at level 9 or 10. I hope I’ve helped. I’m still practicing every day. It takes a while to change the thinking that got you where you are. Be patient and be kind to yourself.

Dave G

For more information about our Individual and Couples Therapy Sessions, Workshops, or Groups please give us a call at 404-584-7500 or email office@relationshipcoaching.net

]]>http://relationshipcoaching.net/archives/1136/feed4Learning Not to Jump off the Structure and Other Essential Lessons of Growing Uphttp://relationshipcoaching.net/archives/1123
http://relationshipcoaching.net/archives/1123#respondWed, 02 May 2018 22:11:00 +0000http://relationshipcoaching.net/?p=1123

LEARNING NOT TO JUMP OFF THE STRUCTURE

AND OTHER ESSENTIAL LESSONS OF GROWING UP

BY BRIAN EAMES

UPPER ELEMENTARY TEACHER AND IMAGO FACILITATOR

Anywhere in America, 1978, 12:45 on a Tuesday

At the periphery of a vast playground, two teacher aides hover by double doors leading into the brick building. Out on the green, one batch of children, inspired by a Winslow Homer painting, hold hands while running in an arc. The boy on the end is catapulted through the air. Another group of children plays kickball. A third has settled in at the ubiquitous swing set, daring children running between the arcs of the swingers. Four girls practice back handsprings. The two aides swap casserole recipes and ignore the students.

Children are playing.

Later that same afternoon…

Children have returned from school, via bus, and walked the remaining distance home unattended. Snack (cookies and whole milk) is followed by a wave goodbye from parent. Children go outside. The youth of the neighborhood, ranging in age from 5 to 15, gather in an open space — a field, perhaps, a large backyard or an empty lot. The older ones suggest entertainments. Two girls pull away to play jacks. One boy with a Superball lures a buddy away to see how fast the ball scoots on the second jump. The remaining 12 settle on a game of Kick-the-can. Not a single adult is in sight.

There is laughter. There are tears when the Superball hits a younger boy in the eye, but his brother tells him to buck up. He does. An hour passes. Kick-the-can morphs into a game of soccer. Nearing the dinner hour, the sound of pealing bells penetrates dusky air. Time for dinner.

Children have played.

Forty years pass.

Atlanta, 2018, 4 p.m. on a weekday…

Small neighborhood parks stand empty except for a few nannies tending charges. Backyards are barren but for the occasional landscape crew. Parks with larger fields bustle with organized teams that kick or chase balls or hurl frisbees. YMCAs and recreational centers teem with children, many in colored jerseys. Coaches cajole. Parents wait in their cars, arranging schedules and plans via text message.

Other children, back at home, play inside. The most fortunate are experiencing a playdate — a word that did not exist in 1978 — which means that parents arranged by phone or e-mail to congregate their children at a desired time. The parent of the host child is downstairs now, contemplating the homework ritual soon to come.

The children are supervised and safe.

In my neighborhood, I rarely see kids playing outside. Play — loose, sloppy, fun — is less evident in our city now than it was 40 years ago. But in schools that chose not to abandon recess–as many have done in the past decade or so–Recess is core curriculum. Just ask my son.

“How was school today, Hayes?”

“Good,” he says.

“What was the best part?”

“Monarch.” (A popular recess game.)

Play is fun. Great fun, even. And it is essential as well. The routines of most Paideia students are structured and dictated by teachers and schedules, no matter how child-centered we try to be. While that is especially true of school, it is increasingly true of the lives our children lead outside of school, too. After school activities organized by adults have become the norm rather than the exception. There are many factors contributing to that shift in children’s lives: a different perception of safety that has evolved over a generation or two, busier streets, more homework, less connectedness in neighborhood communities among adults, longer work hours, compelling technological devices that work best indoors over wifi. Whatever the cause, the result is that children play less today in the outdoors without adult control than they did 40 years ago.

For many of our students, recess at Paideia is the only time of day they will be with groups of peers in a way largely unstructured by adults. So much happens! Spend a few afternoons out on the woodchips beside the MAC if you doubt it. It’s amazing! (Do beware of lofted projectiles. Unsuspecting adults have an uncanny ability for getting brained by an errant frisbee.) From a safe vantage you will see, most commonly, children blowing off steam through big, physical play. They run, they throw and catch and kick. They tag each other and run some more. But there is more going on than just aerobic release.

Some of the most important lessons of recess happen in the burble of activity that does not reach an adult’s attention. A student has to grapple with the disappointment of not winning. A child has to mend a friendship he damaged in a science lesson an hour before. Two girls chatter gibberish to each other and bond while giggling. Five kids attempt to skirt the entire playground without stepping on any woodchips, strategizing the whole way. A boy has to leave the four square court even when he did not believe he was out; if he perceives he was treated unfairly by the group, he must decide whether to stay with the game, confront the students, ignore and suffer, tell a teacher or push and shove.

Inside the classroom, when two kids enter into conflict, teachers intervene. If we have time, we bring them aside and help them work it through. Other times we quash it, lest the whole group’s mission be diverted. Similarly in after school activities, linear-focused adults have a goal they want to achieve in the time they have with kids: teach them 10 new chess moves or how to defend against a corner kick. Recess, though, is not linear. It’s organic. Games grow, evolve, falter, break apart. Children butt heads, repair or nurse grudges, challenge themselves, bond. Out on the woodchips or basketball court or structure, they have room and time to figure out what they like, how they want to be, and who brings them joy.

Sometimes they choose wrong. Every teacher has had to abandon a lesson after recess to process an injustice so fresh in so many children’s minds that the lesson on the schedule cannot proceed. More common, though, is a smarting wound that gets exposed during dinner table conversation at home, or just before bedtime. The development that comes out of those intrinsic conversations is part of the organism that is Play, and, its most fruitful consequence. Real learning is real growth, and real growth can be messy. It sometimes hurts. Remove the potential for that pain, and you also remove the opportunity for the growth. It’s easier for teachers to witness a child’s angst on the playground (or soon after coming inside) and interpret it as a Teachable Moment than it is for loving parents who hear about the incident long after it has inflicted the pain. It has been hard for me as a parent not to swoop in, contact the teacher, and sort the problem out for one of my boys when he had a conflict at school with another child. I see their pain and feel my own. I want that pain to go away or at least never arise again, even as I know that working through age-appropriate conflicts is part of the work of growing up, and it can yield such powerfully positive results. Sometimes I have chosen well, and sometimes I haven’t, and in the latter case, I allowed my parental compassion to interfere with my child’s growth.

At the extreme, a caregiver who hovers too much and too closely is labeled a Helicopter Parent. Study after study in the last several years has indicated the dangers of such over-parenting. It tends to produce teens who are more anxious, less socially skilled, more likely to be depressed than their less-parented peers. But where does Compassionate Parenting end and Helicopter Parenting begin? That’s a hard one, particularly so because the line of demarcation moves as a child gets older, and isn’t the same for every kid the same age–even siblings! But there is no doubt that our culture has shifted in the Helicopter direction of the continuum. When I want to interact with my child’s teacher or an administrator, I simply have to reach into my pocket. I marvel at how much different it was for my parents, whose contact with my teachers most years didn’t extend beyond the Report Card sent home twice a year. That’s not to say 1978 was idyllic for kids. Parents could be so negligent it would be almost criminal today. When I was eleven, I snuck a hatchet out of my garage, met my buddies in the woods, and started felling towering pine trees in order to construct a log cabin. Was it fun? Oh, yes! Could it have gone really, really badly? Hmmm…. As it happened, it turned out okay for me on the whole, but I’m sure that it did not for some of my peers.

I think when I’m being the best parent to my boys, I’m mindfully living with tension. I want to keep my kids safe, and I want my kids to develop a sense of personal agency when they work things out without me. I can’t just give in to one impulse or the other. That tension shows up for me every day: when Hayes (10) struggles with a piece of math homework, when Keyes (15) asks to take a Lyft ride home at 11:00PM on a Friday night from a gathering with buddies, when Jack (18) navigates the many steps of the college application process. The tension has shifted enormously since the days when I’d follow a few steps behind them at Candler Park playground, but if I can learn anything from the older parent friends of mine who have children in their twenties and even thirties, the tension isn’t quite ever going to go away. Parenting always involves a dance, and the footwork is complex.

Which brings me back to Recess, an institution I appreciate even more today than I did when I first started teaching a quarter century ago. Recess is the Middle Path if there ever was one. Kids get up to all sorts of activities in a large but boundaried space. They can run around plenty, but not over other children. They can get split a knee, bloody a nose, even break a leg (Hayes, jumping off the structure last year), but generally, the problems they encounter are good ones to learn from (i.e., don’t jump off the structure). If a situation gets out of hand, there’s always an adult in sight. Problems arise constantly, but for the most part the children navigate solutions without us teachers. For many of them, it will be the most memorable part of their entire day, and perhaps, too, the most educational.

Mostly, though, recess is a joy-filled time. For the release of tension alone, it would be time well spent, but given how much more potential for growth that it offers, it is truly essential. Recess isn’t enough for kids to grow into self-actualized young adults, but it moves children in the right direction. Hopefully the adults in those children’s lives will figure out how to keep nudging them along as well without taking the work away from them.

Brian Eames is an Imago Facilitator and teacher at The Paideia School in Atlanta, GA where he has taught for 25 years. Together with his partner Jesica Eames, an Imago therapist here at P2 Partnerships, they are finishing the Workshop Presenters training with Maya Kollman and Barbara Bingham. Brian uses his years of experience with Imago in his classrooms and with his three sons with Jesica.

]]>http://relationshipcoaching.net/archives/1123/feed0Intention vs. Impacthttp://relationshipcoaching.net/archives/1086
http://relationshipcoaching.net/archives/1086#respondThu, 04 Jan 2018 22:01:54 +0000http://relationshipcoaching.net/?p=1086The new year brings with it a chance to set new intentions for the 12 months ahead. As we all set our minds to achieve our New Year’s resolutions, I think it is valuable to consider our intentions vs. the impact we ultimately have.

Have you ever been in the position where you are certain that you asked someone very clearly for what you wanted, only to leave the conversation feeling misunderstood? It is amazing how much communication can happen between the lines, the words, or even between the gestures. It is amazing how quickly we can go from conscious to reactive. Old patterns can emerge within a conversation prompted by a simple glance at a watch.

I once ran a women’s group during which the participants assured me they were asking for what they wanted in their relationships, but weren’t getting it because they were either with people who didn’t care, were inept, or were just plain mean. These women were convinced that their partners were not going to give them what they wanted.

After some exploration, I gave them all an assignment. Over the course of the next two weeks, they were to ask for what they wanted at least once. I proposed that the ask was two sentences and only two sentences:

“Partner, I want ______ from you and it would look like______. Would you do that for me?”

Most of the women reported back that they had done this and been consistently disappointed. When we “unpacked” their experience, not once were they able to stick to the protocol I proposed.

For example instead of,

“ I would like you to invite me to dinner in the next couple of days. Will you do that for me?”

It was:

“ Why don’t you ever take me out to dinner without my suggesting it?”

Their insertions of guilt, blackmail, verbal criticism, and defeatism were so habituated that they could not see them. The intention was to ask, but the impact was to shame, start fights, express contempt, and establish a no-win struggle.

It became very clear that we need to shift our Mindsets and our work to impact.

These four elements were present in every crisis we addressed often showing up as misunderstandings because the impact was not aligned with the intention.

Communication: Imago Relationship Therapy employs the skills of Intentional Dialogue to create safe conversations and leads to The Listening Cure. “You never listen to me” is a mantra found in most relationship conflicts; parent-child, romantic, friendships. Using the Imago dialogue to mirror what your partner is saying and help you to find common ground will move your conflicts out of reactivity and into understanding. This step should be taken before any effort is made to influence others. It will lead to less reactivity and much more safety.

Nonverbal Cues: We are vulnerable beings for whom the critical nature of the interactions we have, especially the nonverbal messages, have a huge impact on our sense of safety and belonging. Learning to accompany statements with things like soft eyes and kind tone effect the reactive brain functioning of others, especially an intimate family member. I had a startling moment in a training years ago when a member of the group reported that my non-verbal behaviors had convinced her that I didn’t like nor approve of her as a clinician. I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about since what I SAID with my words in my feedback to her was, I thought, so clear and encouraging. She told me that I crossed my arms while I listened to her tape and I didn’t smile at her – thus her conclusion. I was completely unconscious of my body postures and stunned that I could have such impact unintentionally. This was such a helpful awareness for me when I began to consider how often I was unaware of what messages I might be sending. I know that I can’t help the conclusions others may draw, but I can help whether or not we talk about it.

Power: Understanding the basic need to feel one’s personal power is critical. One very helpful training model that we have utilized is called PPIP, Positive Power and Influence. In this model Positive Power is the goal and it is defined as the ability to achieve one’s objective and maintain relationship. We utilize this concept to offer a challenge of developing a Positive Power ability in relationships. Practicing Positive Power is an excellent way to make sure your intentions match your impact.

Responsibility: It’s no surprise that a core issue in the realm of power development is responsibility. What does taking responsibility mean and what does it look like? I see taking responsibility as the commitment to making good agreements. It is also critical to have the willingness and ability to successfully repair connection when ruptures occur. Good repairs are one of the three fundamental indicators for successful relationships. People can tolerate a wide learning curve in the effort to give and take responsibility when they can also make mistakes, own them, and do something to make it ‘better’.

These elements are most successfully accomplished by focusing on the strengths present in each member of the relationship, instead of the reactive focus on their deficits. So much of our work in Imago focuses on the “space between”. This is the space where our intentions can get muddied and buried in reactivity.

So as you are setting your intentions for this year, and as you make space for your goals, be mindful of how you are asking for what you want. Be clear and intentional about your word choice, and your body language. Understand that asserting your personal power in a positive way is the fastest way to match your impact to your intention. Should you find yourself in a conflict, remember that taking responsibility, owning your actions, and making the necessary repairs will usher you into positive and successful relationships.

March 1, 2000, Piedmont Hospital: Brian and I are nervous and excited. My labor is moving along and all seems fine until it isn’t. The room explodes with panic. People crash in, alarms go off, and I am on a gurney being wheeled into an operating room. Brian is left alone in the labor room not knowing if the blood was mine or the baby’s or both. The operating room is freezing and full of people yelling orders. No one speaks to me. Chaos roars.

And then these large, warm hands cup my face. A woman leans over me on the operating table. Huge brown eyes and a surgical mask come into view. I look at her, panicked and crying. She holds my face and says, “Listen to me, sweetheart. We’re putting a mask over your face. We have to get your baby right now. Breathe for me.”

Jack is born a few minutes later, not breathing, unresponsive, and suffering from tremendous blood loss. Teams of people leave with him. They bring Brian to me. And we wait. Those horrific minutes stretch into days as we wait to see if he will live and then if he will recover. Jack did both. A week later they discharge him from the intensive care unit and send us home – shocked and scared and in love with a baby who had a terrifying arrival. The trauma of that crisis lingered with us for months. Years later both of us can time travel right back into that operating room if we’re not careful.

May 29, 2017: As I write this today Jack will turn 18 this year, and we are getting ourselves ready for his launch. This many years later my mind will go back to the woman in the operating room. I never knew her name or saw her again. And she is the one I think about — those strong, warm hands holding my face; her wise, determined eyes and calm voice telling me to breathe while chaos reigned.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, those seconds with her symbolize one way I think about crisis – in my own life and with clients in my office. When crisis arrives we need someone to look at us, to be present with us in our terrified space, and to tell us to breathe. This year is the 30th anniversary of our first date. Twenty-one years married, Brian and I have lived with and through crisis, some out of our control and a few of our own making. People often make their way into my practice because a crisis has ruptured that destabilizes everything: their relationship, life, home, family, friends, community, or profession.

Crisis storms in many forms: illness, death, betrayal, secrets, accidents, violence, divorce, addiction, finances, arrests. Sometimes it’s unexpected tragedy, leaving shock and raw devastation in its wake. Other people describe a slow-burning problem that erupted into damage beyond anything they could have prepared for. No matter how it shows up, what I know is that the path between that moment and what will become a new normal is long and uncertain.

Crisis in every form is an assault. It’s an assault on what we believed until now to be reliable and true, whether it’s health, safety, life, trust, love, faith, stability, or connection. Suddenly what we know we don’t know anymore. Crisis leaves us feeling out of control, often on a course that we cannot slow down or stop. It’s isolating, overwhelming, and lonely.

When people arrive in my office in crisis I begin with what the couple or the person needs now in order to breathe – both literally and figuratively. What needs to happen in the next 10 minutes, the next hour, the next day, or the next week? My initial connection with them is about holding the space – the unfolding tragedy – and guiding some initial decisions so the couple can grasp what stabilizing might look like for the immediate future.

Crisis at its core demands that we exist in uncertainty, discomfort and despair for an unpredictable and unknown amount of time. Try as we might there is no sprint to the finish line. I hear people say I just want “this to be over” “to make sense of it” “to understand” “to move on” “to make it stop” “to go back to normal” “to go back to the way we were before…” The reality is that a new normal is taking root, trying to gain a foothold in a world forever changed. That reality is harsh and it takes time. It’s a marathon, really, that demands many things including pain, stillness, patience, despair, creativity, anger, sorrow, giving-in, action, planning, willingness, privacy, community, courage and possibility.

I sat with a couple recently now two years into an affair recovery. They spent the session reflecting on what transpired in the last two years. Several months after the affair erupted they remember their decision to slow down and get quiet enough to look at what happened, explore how they got to this place, and to sit with what was unfolding in their marriage. “I stopped reacting and started listening first to myself and then to my partner” one of them said. “And then we started listening to the affair,” said the other. They described the choice to step into a frightening and miserable journey. One that ever-so slowly turned from misery into discovery, and then into opportunity, and then to renewal. This couple talks about the affair in different language now. They describe it as “something that happened to us” and not something one of them “did to the marriage or the partner.” The hurt, pain, and fear are not forgotten and those hard places don’t have a grip on the couple anymore. Couples who get to this place often say that while they never want to go through it again they also know that the present connection, intimacy and resilience grew through the roar of crisis.

We all make our own way in crisis. It’s a highly individualized experience and for a long time it’s all consuming. I do, though, see themes in those who work with and grow through crisis. A few things that can happen on the other side of crisis:

You access an internal wisdom and knowing that love is both resilient and fragile and most of all requires practice and care.

You own your story, how you got there, and how you made it to a different place.

You accept that grief, regret, and pain about the crisis will wave in. You respect it when it surfaces. And you trust that it will roll back out, especially when you stop resisting.

You know that none of us are invincible or immune. All of us are vulnerable. Our lives can change in an instant.

You have a sense of your own ability in the world – both the ability to heal yourself and others and the ability to hurt yourself and others. Knowing this empowers even when the situation feels powerless.

You know that joy must be cultivated and nurtured.

When crisis arrives there is no going back. We have choices in how we go forward, even if we had no choice in what happened. And we take our history with us because it’s ours and it shapes how we move in the world. Find the hands that will hold your face and tell you to breathe. Be those hands for someone else in need. Because when you begin to breathe change and choice are ahead.

Jesica M. Eames, LMSW, JD, is a Certified Imago Relationship Therapist trained by Wendy Palmer Patterson. She specializes in working with couples and individuals, creating a safe environment for them to look honestly and compassionately both at themselves and their relationships. Jesica is known for her empathic and interactive approach with clients, working with them to restore connection, repair and recover from crisis or grief, and experience the possibility of transformation.

Jesica has been in a relationship with her husband, Brian, for 26 years. They have three sons together.

For information about our Individual or Couples counseling or workshops,
please contact our office at 404-584-7500 or email Jen at jen@relationshipcoaching.net

]]>http://relationshipcoaching.net/archives/1008/feed3What It’s Like to Take the Getting the Love You Want Workshophttp://relationshipcoaching.net/archives/949
http://relationshipcoaching.net/archives/949#commentsFri, 30 Jun 2017 18:33:53 +0000http://relationshipcoaching.net/?p=949Insights From the Couples Weekend

By Allison Dragony

My husband and I were just moving in together when I first came to work with Bob and Wendy. My husband works most weekends and with all that we were doing renovating our house, it didn’t seem like the right time to do the workshop. Well, renovating became engagement, then wedding planning, then the first year of marriage, and ultimately the happy welcoming of our first child. It wasn’t until now, two years after our son’s arrival, and a pending move, that we finally made the workshop a priority. When the student is ready, the teacher will come.

We were ready.

So…what is it like to take Getting the Love You Want you ask? TRANSFORMATIVE!

We joke at the workshop, who is the “dragger” and who is the “dragee”. My husband was the proud “dragee”. Nothing like telling your partner you want to spend the weekend with your work family talking about your relationship! He knew exactly what he was in for, as did I (or so we thought!). We joked that most of the workshop would be spent discussing the cleaning habits of the other, and each of us felt we would be found right.

Sure enough, our very first Imago Dialogue was about cleaning…on both sides. Boy was it fun! We practiced the skill while getting frustrations we had been squabbling about for years off our chests. This is the beauty of this work. Seemingly small conversations about little irritations that I have avoided for years, or we have touched upon but never resolved, were settled and illuminated in a 30 minute dialogue. Yes, we dialogued for 30 minutes about hair in the tub and how we do laundry! Neither of us understood why it bothered the other, nor did we even notice we were doing it.

But after this dialogue, I was able to see the deeper meaning for Chris behind his frustration, and I was able to understand the deeper meaning behind my frustration. Of course the truth is almost always, it has nothing to do with the behavior. Sure, the behavior is annoying, but knowing WHY it bothers you is an incredibly productive realization. I am now keenly aware of trying not to create extra work for someone who works so hard for our family, and I will try to notice other things that I may do that create that reality for him. He has made an incredible effort to keep the hair out of the tub and show that sparkly tub and me how much he respects us!

After this dialogue was the first time in the workshop my husband used the word “transcend”. It became our theme for the weekend. You have to transcend your own ego and perspective to get to this incredible space of connection and growth. That is surprisingly easy to achieve with Imago. It is something so simple, yet it creates the most potential of anything I know to create a unified and better humanity.

Y’all. This brings us to lunch on the FIRST DAY!

I won’t go into the nitty gritty of the full two days, but this workshop was the best thing we could have done for our marriage and our personal growth. It is a TWO-DAY WORKSHOP and our hearts and souls grew three sizes.

My favorite part of my job coordinating the Getting the Love You Want workshop is watching the couples. The most incredible gift is to see a couple at the beginning of a workshop and then see them at the end. I’ve seen the pain and the longing, and the giving and the healing. Everyone that shows up to this workshop is taking a chance and putting themselves out there to make their lives better. It is a magical space that melts walls and awakens sleeping lovers.

We all carry around pain and try to protect ourselves from it. We all build walls around our hearts and minds, sometimes particularly with our spouse. When those walls are becoming too thick, and you don’t recognize the person you have made a life with, it is time for this workshop.

It will put you and your partner through an amazing journey. You will be challenged, you will have to put your own needs aside and also to the forefront, you will listen and learn more than you have in a very long time… if not ever. You will make connections to your past, and make goals for your future. It is not just a couples workshop, it is a life lesson. It is a way to become a better person. A more empathetic, trusting, and happier human and to raise little people who do this too. It is a way to change interactions with people you meet on the street, because you know all they want deep down is to be heard. That is all we want, to exist and to keep existing in a safe space. You will become a better person, a better partner, a better parent, a better family member, a better citizen. You will heal.

Post workshop, we are tired, we are open, we are a little raw, but most of all we are so excited about the prospect of a life together, where we can talk about little irritations and big irritations in the safest way possible. We have the tools to create the life we want, and it will spill over into how our little one sees the world. That is an incredible gift.

By Allison Dragony

To Register for a Getting the Love You Want Workshop, please Click Here

]]>http://relationshipcoaching.net/archives/949/feed1What Is It Like To Be In Relationship With You?http://relationshipcoaching.net/archives/911
http://relationshipcoaching.net/archives/911#commentsWed, 03 May 2017 16:17:27 +0000http://relationshipcoaching.net/?p=911

How Keeping the Love You Find Can Help You End Painful Patterns

By Wendy Palmer Patterson

Have courage? Ask yourself the question, what is it like to be in relationship with me?

So many of us have hurt histories with our significant others and we aren’t at all clear what is wrong with our ‘pickers’. Do we select partners so poorly that we repeat painful patterns?

A woman recently told me that she had a series of relationships with full blown narcissists and she couldn’t figure out why. Her hurt and pain with not being ’seen’ and cared for by her partners was long and deep. What’s happening here?

We are often very good at analyzing others. Some of us are experts at the game of guessing, assuming, and convincing ourselves that we know what someone else is thinking, feeling, wanting, or doing. We then make decisions about how to be with these spotlighted, special people. “He wants me to be… “She needs me to be… “”I know you want… “ Any of these sound familiar?

As small children being able to figure out what the big people wanted, and when to come to them or away from them, was survival. Consequently, we trained ourselves to watch carefully and act accordingly. Unfortunately, our lens for that ‘looking’ was very immature and survival based. As adults, we need different lenses for relating.

We think a new and better choice for living well is to reverse the gaze and focus our attention on self-reflection. Finding the time, energy, and ability to look in the mirror, to ask ourselves important questions, and to be willing to see ourselves as others see us, can be transformative. These are not skills that most of us learned nor saw from others. How many of us saw an adult consider and then offer “ You know, I made a mistake there. I caused you pain because I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of what I was doing. A better way I could have handled that might have been to…” I certainly didn’t.

Along with learning about our impact on others, receiving love turns out to be one of the most difficult challenges we have in our relationships. We think this is because we have developed so many defenses and filters to keep us safe that we also keep ourselves in a cage. We started this ‘caging’ as young children. We figured out how to please, avoid pain, and shape ourselves for success. The long-term result is that those clever protections became bars that limit us in our abilities to relate. Our learnings about how to be in relationship were very well programmed in early childhood. We had to figure out what it took to get along with our siblings, our parents, and all those other significant people who could make our lives good or make our lives bad. We did not typically learn great relationship skills in childhood because we were not fully conscious and we didn’t know that that’s what we were doing.

It turns out that relating well requires good skills. It also requires figuring out ways to be our most authentic selves and to receive well from others. We want our intentions and our impact to match up. We need to learn how to really listen. We need to learn how to transfer our hurt and frustrations into effective communications that make our lives better and more pleasurable. We need to learn how to ask well for what we want. We need to make good repairs. We need to know what it is like to be in relationship with us. We also need to listen to the stories we tell ourselves and consider them from a new and adult perspective.

The great thing is that we can learn these skills now. Once a year P2 offers such an opportunity through our workshop for individuals called Keeping the Love You Find. I am proud to be part of teaching a class that can introduce and expand all of these into useable tools for relating.

Come join us in this workshop in June. I think it is one of absolute best offerings we have. Participants are single, committed, married, divorcing. They attend because of curiosity and because of pain. Everyone is there to be more self aware. (Hey I made a rhyme!)…The focus is all on ourselves, but we have found ways to help you “reverse the gaze” that are interesting, safe, and even fun! Would love to have you…

As much as we’d like to think otherwise, most of the decisions we make are on autopilot. In the brain’s drive for efficiency, most of our behavior becomes automatic. Someone smiles at us, we smile back. Someone yells at us in traffic, we are ready to do battle. Most of the stupid decisions we make are spontaneous reactions to threat, or perceived slights regarding respect or lack of appreciation. Even 5 minutes later, we can wonder at our own behavior. How did we get a parking space mixed up with our self respect, and regard for others? “What was I thinking?” This is one of the signs that you might be in the overload phase of “Don’t Worry, I got this!”.

When life shows up (children, careers, finances, mortgages, and just stuff breaking) our brains are working hard to sort out what is important. If we are not paying attention, we’ll just take it all on. The overwhelm, the stress, the self criticism when we can’t live up to our own “made up” expectations are the territory that can lead to acute and sometimes chronic depression, sadness, and a lack of joy in our lives. We loose the “win” in just being alive.

God forbid, that we admit that we can’t carry it all. Believe me, it is hard to be accepting of myself. The constant comparison between what I accomplish and what I “should” be able to do chips away at the joy of life. I become automatic in my relationships, and those close to me can tell.

What happens when we become our own “best friend”? What “self image” do we have to lay down to be more gentle with ourselves? What can happen when we embrace our humanity, admit vulnerabilities and our limitations? The laying down of “Don’t worry, I got this”, and picking up “I’m doing the best I can” can deliver us to compassion for ourselves and the loved ones in our lives.

So the next time you find yourself attempting to take it all on, please take a deep breath, maybe even count to ten, and say “let me get back to you about that”. s It may help to think of what your best friend might say to you and your never ending list. This may help you smile at yourself and relax, even just a little.

Are you tired? Do you think you should be feeling things you’re not feeling? Are you experiencing low-level depression, sadness, wariness? Perhaps it’s the holidays!

The entrance of winter makes for a dramatic and yet often unseen energetic shift in everything. Much of the time we ignore the messages from nature because we live with enough insulation that we can. However our relationships know.

This is the season full of expectations that are not spoken of, acknowledged, or asked for. The holiday seasons call up our histories. In your history was December a time you felt joy? Did you feel the stress of your parents? Did you experience being left out? Overwhelmed?

There is such a range of experiences tied to this time of year. Our deep relationships become more focused, appreciated, and pressurized. We often partner with someone whose experience of December was very different from ours.

This is the time beyond most others when we should be full of care and making sure that our intentions are matching our impact. These will be some of the best gifts we can give ourselves and others.

For yourself, and therefor your relationship:

If your introversion is knocking on your door, make sure you take time for yourself quietly every day. Be sure to tell your partner you love them and you’re taking care of the relationship by listening deeply to yourself. Remind them you’ll be back later.

If your extroversion is banging on your window, call somebody besides your partner, take a walk, smile at someone who needs the smile.

This is naturally a time of letting go, having more exposure to our roots, and seeing the bare branches that are our structures. Reflection is invited and can be a wonderful opportunity should we decide to take it. Make these decisions together, be gentle with your selves, and work on being satisfied with ‘showing up’.

You know when something wonderful that you are a part of grows and changes and it leaves you feeling awestruck? That is happening to us at P2. The landscape of relationship work epitomized in Imago Relationship Therapy, that has occupied us for the past 30 years, has officially rolled out into the greater community.

So many people who experience Imago have said that they want to take these concepts, these values and beliefs, these skills into their churches, their schools, their doctors offices, their corporations, their nonprofits and their families. Our wise colleagues in Austria decided to take the Imago clinical work and adapt it for the greater communities. We, at Imago Relationships International, have been teaching this Professional Imago Facilitator program in Europe, South Africa, Israel, New Zealand, England and Canada for the past several years. Bob and I are so proud to be the first to offer this training in the United States.

During this past year we have had the privilege of training a remarkable group of people from all over the east coast to take Imago into their various and interesting settings. These Professional Facilitators are currently conducting their required projects after completing this intensive training for non-therapists who want to become expert at facilitating conscious relationships wherever they go. The range and scope of what we are seeing applied is thrilling.

This training is designed to take the relational understandings and the new paradigm of Both-And and ground the students thoroughly in how to think about, teach about, and apply Imago to facilitation one on one, with dyads, families, groups and organizations. All of these are best conducted, in our opinion, with the application of the Relational Paradigm and the skills of Imago. The training is a substantive commitment of 12 training days, in depth reading, consultation, skill application, and crafting a project designed to further the understanding of Imago application.

One example of this is the Teacher/Facilitator who is teaching dialogue to fifth graders then challenging them to go home and teach their parents with appreciations and to use the skills in ongoing classroom experiences. A beautiful calendar of amazing photographs of nature in dialogue lives on our wall as an example of another project from an Austrian Facilitator/Mountain Instructor/Photographer couple.

If you have any desire to expand your footprint in your work or community to include the identity of a Professional Imago Facilitator please consider joining us in January! The program is designed in 4 components and, while session 2, 3 and 4 require attending session 1, they can be taken one at a time. All 4 sessions and the complete projects are requirements for certification AND we have more and more people who are attending pieces of this work with no intention of being certified rather for their personal enhancement.

“I believe your relationship can thrive. I believe your relationship could become masterful. I believe well over 50% of your challenge is simply lack of skills.” This constitutes an absolute, basic mindset I hold with the couples that come into my office.

After 40 some years in this business, I get it that therapy still often seems like it is correlated with illness, failure, and general lack. Roughly 5% of all the couples in our culture will ever seek therapy. The stereotypes, the costs, the anxiety are prohibitive.

I think this is slowly changing, but I also think that a major gift Imago can bring to the world is the understanding that necessary relationship skills come through challenge and work. Especially if you’ve never seen a competent, successful relationship. Have you? You probably never learned those skills in school. Where would you expect to have gleaned this important knowledge?

I maintain that skills are best learned out of the therapy room in a workshop setting. I am a firm believer that the Imago couples and individuals workshops provide a six-month leap in the experience of competency in a relationship. It is invaluable to have the opportunity to learn and grow together as relational beings, as a couple, and as an individual in community in a setting that makes learning and growing fun and normalized.

As adults, we are not prone to willingly reach out to gain new skills. Our life experiences have taught us that wanting and gaining new skills is not an exciting and interesting experience. Those of us who like to learn new skills, and go after them, have had good life experiences being a novice. Unfortunately, many of us think we should hide or stay away from anything we are not good at already.

We speak frequently of the importance of understanding the willingness to make a change and the ability to make a change. We tell our couples that they can’t effectively decide whether they want to make a change in their relationship, unless first they know how to make a change. The Imago workshops give you the how, the roadmap, the help.

Couples that decide not to pursue the roadmap once they know how to make a change have good reasons. Reasons to be respected. Sometimes, resistance is driven by an avoidance of addressing our own ineptitudes and failures, but diving into these areas can lead us into much greater competency and success.

All the struggles in relationship can be wound down to a single problem: how to navigate our differences. Shifting our mindset to a place of curiosity about our differences instead of terror, can help us find a bridge to one another. It can instill the belief that synergy is possible.

I frequently have the pleasure of marrying couples. I have moved to a requirement that they attend workshops before I marry them so we are all on the same page about the challenges. I am convinced that investing one’s resources to gather skills, consciousness, and hope should be a requirement of relationship.

Go get skills! Enjoy yourself while you do it!! Think of yourself as improving you, your relationships, and the whole world you touch.

– Wendy Palmer Patterson, LCSW, LMFT

If you are interested in attending one of our relationship workshops, please contact our office at office@relationshipcoaching.net or give us a call at 404-584-7500.

Our next Getting the Love You Want Couples Workshop is September 17-18, 2016.